Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday July 17, 2003 @09:01PM
from the fun-and-games-over dept.

govatos writes "Bandwidth issues and DOS Attacks brought Bytemonsoon, a popular BitTorrent
page down, but now pages are closing for scarier reasons. Torrentse.cx 'recieved a cease and desist letter during the day of Wednesday, July 16, 2003 for copyright infringement. The entire website has been removed and will not return.' Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?"

The BitTorrent protocol apparently relies on a single "tracker" to keep track of hosts currently in the "torrent". Therefore, all the *AA has to do is shut down that tracker. Even Kazaa and Gnutella is more decentralized with their "supernodes".

If only they combined the decentralization tracking of other p2p protocols with BitTorrent's distributed and simultaneous upload and download, we'd have a winner.

give parent more informative points, parents parent thinks bit torrents suppose to be like kazaa or gnutella. its not.

use a torrent when you have something you want to 'host' on your site but can't bank the bandwidth necessary for everyone to get a decent download rate.

theres no trying to thwart the *aa built in whatsoever. interesting the poster says some site was shutdown but doesn't say WHY - I'd guess it has nothing to do with the method of hosting but the content

Bittorrent was not designed as a way to anonymously get files, or to trick the RIAA, or anything like that.

It was designed as a way for people to distribute large files without paying gobs for bandwidth.

Wonderful.

So who do you think shut them down? Why? Because the RIAA will destroy any alternate distribution channel, regardless of content carried. If you have not noticed, the "promotion" business is mostly about suppressing other content. If a DoS won't do it, the **AA's will put their own content up and then send a cease and dissist letter.

The **AA are going to fail sooner or later. Their technology is simply obsolete and others are starting to produce too much for them to squash. They don't have the resources to fight everyone, and that's what it's comming to. They have enough money and resources to make a few people sorry before they go away. You have to wonder why they bother.

Oh, come on! This isn't about "alternate distribution channels." This is about blatant copyright infringement, pure and simple. This is about people putting up entire movies, TV series, and bundles of CDs for download on a website. A website with a totally laughable "We don't have any control over what people upload, and upload of copyrighted materials is strictly prohibited!" disclaimer, I might add. (It didn't work for Napster, what made torrentse.cx think it would work for them?)

Regardless of what we might think about the morality of downloading unauthorized content (and though I do like downloading the stuff as much as the next guy, I don't think that the fact that a big corporation put it out makes it right), copyright infringement is against the law, and the copyright-holders are perfectly within their rights to shut them down.

In my opinion, the torrentse.cx people, and all the other ones who use something so blatant as a public website to distribute copyrighted and widely available media--TV series, movies taped out of movie theaters, and so on--are just asking to be prosecuted. I mean, with Kazaa at least there's a veneer of anonymity--they have to subpoena your ISP to find out who you are. But with a website, about all you have to do is whois the domain. A website is still a website, and for crying out loud nobody's distributed copyrighted mp3s from unobfuscated websites for at least five years--they learned their lesson the last time the RIAA sued mp3 distribution websites. Quite frankly, I'm surprised torrentse.cx managed to stay around as long as it did.

I don't think so. Bittorrent is just going to go back to be what it was really designed as: a great way to distribute legal files.
The Torrentse's and the Bytemonsoon's where just taking advantage of a hole in the media companies radar.
I'm surprized they lasted as long as they did.

I took a look at Torrentse.cx the other day when someone linked to it in a/. comment. The whole thing was pretty much full of illegally-traded software, movies, music, the whole 9 yards.

Bittorrent is a great application for those situations when large downloads like the Red Hat ISOs are hard to get through the normal servers. Piracy is piracy, and it should be shut down. End of story.

Until the price meets the demand. The demand is for unlimited multimedia, the price is waiting for it. So until the "copyrighted" material meets what the market sees as fair, then there will be a desire for p2p copyright exchange. Let's face it, most of the stuff on p2p is absolute shit because if they like what they have they'll invest in it, just kills time to have multimedia you don't want to waste money on.

Don't know how much sense that made, but p2p is too big to stop now, even with a million bazillion lawsuits.

I've used BitTorrent once or twice myself, and found
it to be a good system. That's only once or twice,
because there just isn't that much legally
distributable material that can reach the required
"critical mass" for BitTorrent to be effective and
necessary.

Nevertheless, the fact that there are proven legitimate
uses of the code should be enough to prevent the code
from disappearing. That, and all the copies that are
already downloaded.

The real question is whether people will feel safe to
post BitTorrent links even when they are distributing
something that is 100% legit.

BitTorrent has one major advantage/disadvantage
relative to Freenet. You can control what material
you are involved in the re-distribution of to match
whatever your defintion of "fair use" is. With Freenet
you distribute everything or you distribute nothing
because you don't know what anything is.

Personally, I prefer the BitTorrent approach. It would
be a shame if the RIAA dogs force everyone to the
"know nothing" approach.

It is a bit of a niche, but it serves that niche REALLY REALLY well. It's a shame all the illegal file sharing is wearing it down.

The past month I've been using bittorrent to distribute a 500 meg DivX of someone playing a game, basic jist of it was they ran around kicking ass with a VCR running, and they decided to edit it up and distribute it. I put it on my site.. in less than 12 hours I had run up about 20GB of outgoing traffic. Poor server was doing so much I/O working at a shell was almost impossible.

After panicing (thank someone I don't have bandwidth metering) I threw up a bittorrent tracker and told people what to do. I've been running it since then, maybe 3 weeks now. Been averaging about 100k/sec output since then (sometimes much higher, sometimes much lower). Bittorrent doesn't give me a way to look at how many completed downloads the file has had, but judging from the feedback I've recieved several hundred people have the movie.. who knows how many downloaded it that never said a word.

More artists are going to have to offer their creative works themselves. I decided to put all of my former band's work as well as stuff I'm working on now up for free (the site is 8x7.org [8x7.org] if anyone cares), and I have actually started getting interest from other bands I know that want to contribute their music for free. The truth is that the chances that you are going to see any real profit off of a recording is slim to none, so why not just let people listen to it for free? Most musicians make money off of live gigs and merchandising, so why not cut out the middleman (the recording industry) entirely?

The same thing goes for other content. Look at Homestar Runner [homestarrunner.com]. They offer the content for free, and make money off of the merchandise - its a great formula. Just this week they introduced a set of figurines, and in the first day brought in over $15,000!

True, however, remember that ths is the very reason why Indie music labels were founded in the first place - to bypass the middleman while making profit at the same time. As a matter of fact, this approach has become extremely popular.

Remember that not all people are as generous as your group is, and they want to make profit off of their creativity and music.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone? Now, don't get me wrong - I love it. Some sites post the coolest stuff, including stuff you'd never find (or would take years to dl) on any of the popular p2p networks. Though, that being said, have you seen some of these sites? It's the most blatant piracy ever! These guys are just begging to be shut down. It's kinda like the way it was when Napster first got popular and everyone was like "woah! free stuff for the taking!" This is the same thing; once again the ability to steal stuff has been taken to a new level and it's only a matter of time before the rest of the world notices... I just hope someone comes up with a better way to let ppl know about torrents besides posting them on easily shut down web sites.

It happens when your referer (gotta love HTTP standards spelling) is slashdot. If you copy/paste it to the address bar, you'll see the actual site (assuming your browser didn't cache the nasty redirect).

Back in the day, Slashdot linked to them (when they were still up) crushing their server... so, the admins used mod_rewrite to send any Slashdot referred folks to a different site (with a similar url).

BTW, that was just an observation.I use torrents to get new distros, getting them from the officialftp sites is impossible when they are hot off the press.BT lets me download 3 ISO's in less than three hours..

Even if you don't want to share your content on Freenet, which it might not be big enough to handle yet, you could always share your torrent files. Replacing the centralized part with a totally decentralized network.

Why does Bittorrent always get posted up as a "FILE SHARING" program, its no more a "fire sharing" program than windows IIS. Bittorrent happens to make it convenient for a single distributor to allow access to his files without incurring a major bandwidth costs.

IN fact to find out someone who does just that, go to gametab.com, or redvsblue.com

they have saved craploads of bandwidth on there completely legal files. Bandwidth has made it so files can be available that would otherwise be completely unavailable otherwise as the main host went down.

Bittorrent is being abused as a file distribution method for movies and such, but so is IRC, and so are chat programs and e-mail for christ sake.

Are we going to ban file send capabilies from chat now because someone might send the HULK over it?

How about just ban the entire internet? You can argue that Bittorrents greatest use is for downloading large, illegal files,and I might agree with you. But the internet, by your same thinking, is just a big illegal file sharing network too, all you have to do is prove taht more than oh 50% of the bandwidth USED on the internet is used to download illegal content, or hell if your the RIAA just try to prove 20%, and then you could say "well the internet is just a havent for filesharers we should see it shutting down"

what rediculous bullshit. I have loved bittorrent, I use it to download licenced anime, and to download redvsblue episodes and the odd movie that gets slashdoted.

The main difference between bittorrent and kaaza, is bittorrent is not an anonymous fileshare program, there is always a single point of distribution, and thus a single person that can be tracked down to have started it.

why is this a "good" thing? because its not a filesharing program, using bittorrent is not an excercise in your fair use rights, you may be using it as such, but it has a very powerfull, very real legal use for it.

Unlike kaaza, with a littlle tweaking, bittorrent could be the "big" thing patches and such being distributed, even by companies such as IDSoftware, your not going to do that with a program like Kaaza, because you have no trust of what the file is going to be. On bittorrent since it comes from a single original source file, you have complete trust of the content being sent to you.

I dont know, i am repsonding to the few threads i saw "but bittorrent is illegal" and i started in a new thread cause i could easily see them getitng modded down.

First off, it's very important to note that bittorrent isn't a P2P network; it is a completely new protocol, fundamentally different then anything that has come before it. In that regard, the "movement" so to speak will not die. The technology will continue to be improved on and it will continue to be used by people who love to get distros the second they come out. Hopefully, we'll finally see bittorrent get some commercial use. There is no reason every game company shouldn't be releasing their betas/demos with bittorrent. It is perfect for these companies that use very little bandwidth, but then every so often require HUGE amounts of bandwidth that force them to use mirrors, which are becoming increasingly annoying. Bittorrent is really a revolutionary innovation, IMO.

But, it has some serious shortcomings that need to be addressed. For a technology that promises infinitely scalable bandwidth, the tracker isn't very scalable at all. Multi-tracker functions (both the interconnectivity of trackers and the use of multiple isolated trackers within the torrent) are an absolute must for this technology to prosper. Also, an apache mod where you could simply upload the file to your web server and not have to worry about running a bittorrent "seed" would be great. From the companies standpoint nothing has really changed, but instead of everyone flooding your website to get this file, the file is only accessible by your bittorrent tracker, so your bandwidth remains consistent. And the company doesn't need to run a separate seed process for the thousands of files it may be serving, the apache mod would only open connections for files that are requested by the tracker (which would only request the file if the full file wasn't already being distributed by those connected).

As for the piracy aspect, I don't really see it going anywhere but I also don't see it growing. There is always going to be some site where you can upload torrents, and that site will always die within 6 months only to be replaced by another.

Also, an apache mod where you could simply upload the file to your web server and not have to worry about running a bittorrent "seed" would be great

I've been thinking about a project like this for a while. Everyone who wants to help out, please see http://mod-torrent.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] and get in touch with me.

If the seeding of files can be fully transparent (that's the easy part) and the tracking be made less resource intensive (the hard part) why would a company not want to distribute their own legal content with BitTorrent? Sure, the client must be installed first, but more and more sites are already requiring special download managers. The BitTorrent client is small and simple. It, or something like it, could easily become a standard requirement or the funtionality integrated into existing download mangers.

I have a T3 connection. Some might think that's fast but when you distribute content on even a moderate scale it won't cut it. With BitTorrent I've suddenly got a T3+whatever upload bandwith is not otherwise used by the people downloading from me. If even a couple of college kids with 10Mbit connections in their dorms download from me my effective serving capacity is multiplied. The base service, the T3, remains the same, the added capacity is pure free bandwith. Mini-Akamai networks for everyone!

BitTorrent is NOT meant to handle pirated data! The tracker servers for the torrents are fixed targets, easy food for governments. BT is meant to distribute legitimate content. Frankly, I've been taking advantage of the pirate sites while they've been up, but I'm not surprised they're going kablooey.

Depending on the sort of illegitimate content you're looking for or distributing, try some other protocol. Freenet, or Gnutella2 or something else based on supernodes, will work a lot better than BitTorrent.

Actually, HavenCo is no longer a safe haven. Ryan Lackey will be doing a talk about the events that transpired in 2002 at DEFCON 11. Here's the text from the DEFCON Speakers Page [defcon.org]:

HavenCo: What Really Happened

HavenCo, an attempt at creating an offshore data haven, was launched in 2000 by a small team of cypherpunks and pro-liberty idealists.

During 2002, the Sealand Government decided they were uncomfortable with their legal and PR exposure due to HavenCo, particularly in the post-DMCA and post-911 world, and regulated, then took over the remains of the business, forcing the remaining founders out. While HavenCo continues to serve a small number of customers, it no longer is a data haven, and has exposed the ultimate flaw in relying on a single physical location in one's quest for privacy.

Ryan Lackey was with HavenCo from inception until late 2002, and will tell exactly what happened (not the PR-friendly whitewashed version) from day one until the end, what lessons were learned, and how similar goals can be achieved in the future by motivated individuals and groups.

I, as the author of BitTorrent, would like to make it very clear than I have nothing to do with any of the BitTorrent sites, and that BitTorrent is not and never will be designed to be good for illegal distribution. In particular I'm not doing anything to decentralize the tracker or add anonymity. It is in fact quite anonymity-unfriendly.
BitTorrent is also used for a lot more than just TV shows and movies, which people would find out if they bothered doing any web searching.
I keep telling people that running warez sites is stupid, and they keep doing it. If you wanna brazenly run a massive warez site, that's your prerogative, but don't be surprised when the long arm of the law comes down on you.

I think its a mistake to categorize tracker decentralization with "warez". Frankly, at this point tracker decentralization is absolutely necesary if bittorrent is going to thrive in a competitive (legal) environment. This is true for 2 reasons: 1.) 2 really cheap servers can do the same job as 1 really really expensive server and 2.) redundancy is necesary to achieve stability. If my downloads (or my clients downloads) are mission-critical, I can't depend on a single tracker, regardless of how cheap it is.

As for anonymity I totally agree with you, however you're already too late. I can already turn off my upload (and the *AA's seem preoccupied with only those who are serving).

I, as the author of BitTorrent, would like to make it very clear than I have nothing to do with any of the BitTorrent sites, and that BitTorrent is not and never will be designed to be good for illegal distribution.

Maybe there was a lot of unauthorized content on BT, but there is a large group of users using it to download legal, live music. Look at Etree's Box of Rain forum [etree.org], Groove Salad [groove-salad.com], and Sharing in the Groove [sharingthegroove.org] as just a few example of the many message boards that have gigabytes of 100% legal, 100% lossless (.shn and.flac) music posted daily.

When the Phish summer tour aud sources come out, BT is going to be key. It sure beats trying to log in to someone's 3-slot FTP.

First and foremost, this is about free access to tools and technology. Remember that copyright infringement is already illegal. The heavy handed tactics of attacking any technology that MIGHT be used for infringement misses the point completely. It's not the technology...it's what you do with it.

You can use a chainsaw to cut your winter firewood, or you can use it to commit a Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Does that mean we should outlaw chainsaws? No, of couse not. The act of killing is already against the law and has nothing to do with chainsaw technology. It is about actions and not tools.

So too is it with technologies like BitTorrent. Yes, certainly a large community of cheap-ass slackers who want goodies for free have exploited this great content delivery system for their own purposes. But to be sure, there are so many other legit uses for it. The LEGAL online music trading community has also taken up BitTorrent to distribute high quality live recordings of bands that permit taping. (The Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam, etc to name even a few!) Sites like Sharing the Groove [sharingthegroove.org] and eTree [etree.org] provide legal lossless audio in FLAC and Shorten format to fans of the music. These lossless files can be quite large and the demand for them can be quite strong the night after a good concert. Well, gosh... This is Just the sort of thing that BitTorrent does and does well. It serves high bandwidth and high demand files with grace and ease. This isn't about piracy. It's about access to technology. The Supreme Court ruled in the betamax case that there were enough legit uses for the technology that it couldn't be outlawed simply because some people were using it to copy porn tapes. I reserve the right to use this technology in a lawful fashion despite what others may choose to do with it.

More than once I have turned to a Torrent link to get a copy of some content that was in high demand at the time. (Animatrix previews, Gollum's Acceptance speech, etc.) All were legit downloads when the normal methods of acquiring the content were under heavy/. effect.

Let's try to keep this in mind during these troubling times of heavy litigation by big media. They killed Napster, they'll try to kill BT and any other centralized system they can find. The chilling new bill introduced in congress should be a warning to us all. The concept of p2p itself is under attack. Fight for your rights to these tools.

Freenet [freenetproject.org] does not have this centralization problem. And a very good new version just came out. I have been using both but because torrents are such a pain to find I have found freenet to be more useful. The freenet guys said bittorrent would run into this problem. I am surprised it has happened so soon.

I noticed bytemonsoon has been resurrected into zenith-net [zenith-net.co.uk]. Same layout and all.
Of course they have a disclaimer "...The administrator of this site (www.zenith-net.co.uk) cannot be held responsible for what its users post, or any other actions of its users. You may not use this site to distribute or download any material when you do not have the legal rights to do so."

Uh yeah... I was shocked to see almost all the posted torrents were illegal.

Insofar as there is a "bittorrent community" (seems a little bit like saying the "ftp community" to me), this should be a good thing for it. This should help make it obvious that BT is not a very good choice for distributing "WareZ" (whether software, music or video), as it's too easy to find these sites and shut them down. Which in turn means that all the people using BT for legit purposes won't have to worry about being slandered by association with these types any more.

And geeze, does everything have to be a "community" these days? BT is more like FTP than it is like much of anything else. Why does it need a "community"? Can't it just be a tool that people use for various purposes?

I am an avid BitTorrent user when it comes to downloading LEGAL stuff like Linux distros. But Bytemonsoon got what was coming to them. A quick glance at the first few entries showed "Win XP Key Generator.rar" and "X-Men 2." To answer the question, "Will corporate pressure kill BitTorrent?" My answer is no, but idiots like the Bytemonsoon webmasters will.

To put it another way, too many people with technical knowledge to create or expand upon something wonderful such as BitTorrent allow their greed to cloud their judgement. It is possible to be greedy over non-physical posessions. Just think about how many people you know that horde movies and music, just to have them, most of which they have never even bothered to play.

Before p2p file sharing, people searched websites and ftp servers for files. Because the files were at a fixed address and were easy access, many sites got shut down. That is why when p2p came along, it was such a hit. Since p2p is distributed, there are no fixed locations to 'shut down'. It is much harder to go after the masses of file sharers than those who explicitly share music on web sites.

BitTorrent was a step back towards the days when the web and ftp was the main source of getting MP3s or whatever content.

I know BitTorrent has technical advantages when it comes to handling load. But in terms of anonymity, it is easier to find the person sharing on the web (or giving an access point) then it is via a peer to peer network. The site is always there. It is hosted by someone who is associated with the owner of a domain name.

...just like there's no FTP movement or IRC movement. There is however an already substantial, and rapidly growing, movement of spoiled techno-brats who not only think they can enjoy the fruits of other people's labor for free, but also that they're entitled to.

This is me announcing my opposition to that movement, that way of thinking. One datapoint to be counted against all the others and a reminder that not all Slashdotters (and not all spoiled tehno-brats;-), think alike.

As always, I am surprised by a lack of recognition for eDonkey2000 at Slashdot. The ed2k is, I believe, technologically superior, it has better clients (and larger variety, and the leading ones are also open source [emule-project.net]). The system is also provides prolonged availablity much better.

In addition to this, ed2k is better protected from "anti-piracy" attacks. There is additional server layer, very resistant to servers being temporarily shut off and requiring (I believe) less traffic. A lot of negotiation is performed directly between clients - the Overnet [overnet.com] model does not require servers at all. Finally, the actual links are in the form of short text links that can be e-mailed, printed and even spelled over the phone, not in the form of.bittorrent files that have to be hosted somewhere. This is also the reason why ed2k-link sites are more resistant to lawsuits.

P.S. This seems to me just one more case of an inferior technology receiving an unfair share of coverage. Like MS dominates the media, BitTorrent seems to dominate Slashdot...

Just a question, the main problem with bittorrent is exactly the same as it used to be in the very early days of MP3, before most of you knew what the internet was and they shut down sites all the time that were just linking directly to the mp3s. You don't see that any now days, no one does directly linking, and the setup would not scale anyway. What do you see, we all use p2p search software. So why can I not use KaZaA to download the.torrent file and run it from there? Of Freenet? It still needs a tracker, but it decentralises the collection of.torrent files. How much work would it take to use KaZaA to get BT files?

Warez never truely dies, it just gets a good solid punch, you know the type where you can't breath for a few seconds, and then it catches its breath and comes back with a vengence.

Just to summarise it:Warez started with BBS, when found they were easy to kill.Moved to password and ratio BBS, a little harder, but not much.On the internet it really came of age with FTP, often with ratio still, this was still trackable thou and sites got killed often.Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that using centralised distribution methods was sorta the real problem leading to getting caught.Along comes P2P, mp3's at first but it scaled well, and so moved quickly to anything.So they started killing the search servers, ie napster, so we moved to P2P searches too.Here is where it gets interesting, the problems with P2P were not created by the copyright holders as much as by the users. Leechers are a huge problem, and basically that leads to speed issues.Now appears bittorrent, it attempts to resolve a lot of bandwidth issues, but it was not designed to be used in a obscured way. It tells the world everything and does not have search built in, but it is fast.People come up with search engines for BT files, but those are like Napster servers, easy kills for the copyright holders.

That is where we stand now...

So the next step is to create, either as a hybrid of BT and something else, as P2P network that allows for distributed searches with content insertion abilities and BT style forced bandwidth sharing.

What is the attack that occures after that? The copyright holders have found it hard to kill KaZaA and the like, but they are too slow for a lot of people, and they can kill the fast BT. What happens when the two merge? No one has figured out how to DoS the P2P nets, and you cannot successfully sue everyone who uses it(there is more to the world then the US)...

>So all you need is to develop a "jumping tracker"
that hops from host to host

Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to imply "it's not possible". I'm just trying to point out that BT in it's current form isn't meant for warez. BT was originally meant for mass distribution of the 'little guy'. Things like open source software without needing massive donations for bandwidth... not it's current abused state of mass distribution of copyright material. Something like that will definitely attract 'bad attention'.

Personally, I will hazard a guess that BT warez will evolve to a state like freenet: nothing centralized. However, the fact that sites like bytemonsoon and torrentse went down shouldn't have been surprising to -anybody-.

Really, when you offer so many pirated software programs on one single site, where a single click (sometimes... two!) would allow you to begin downloading illegal software.. it shouldn't be at all surprising that these sites were instantly gone after and shutdown. It's just incredibly stupid to be so large and so public for something so obviously illegal

Of course, i guess this wasn't so obvious to the webmasters, was it...;)

I agree. The slashdot community may gripe that bittorent was used as an iso distributer, but in reality anyone outside of this community uses it only for downloading the hulk or 'fitty' cent album. Geeks are the minority. Same with the campus search engines in the news. I don't support what the RIAA did, but, truthfully, I've been on a college campus long enough and I can tell you 90% of the population only cares about getting music and/or movies off the net. We may not like that we can't get our linux isos any easier, but what can you do? Most people are pirating. plain and simple. --- no troll intended.

The saddest part of all of this - all of the fines you suggested are lighter than the ones suggested by our beloved Howard Berman as reported in this article [wired.com] and this earlier discussion [slashdot.org].

>Where I live [Ottawa, Ontario]. Many drivers "slide" through stop lines [specially in residential areas where kids and such walk], they speed, merge without signaling, change langes inappropriate [many seem to think you cutoff people instead of going behind], etc.

Grand total: Accidents reduced by an absolute maximum of 8%. In fact, if it works as well as the photoradar blitz, accidents would be reduced by 0.5%. Somewhat less effective than the war on drugs. Well, a lot more than just "somewhat" less effective...

>Personally I think people rolling through stop lines should be fined 500$. I think speeders should have their license revoked. If the cops spent a day doing a traffic blitz they could probably catch a few hundred people [town of 50K here...] easy.

Personally, I think, as the stats suggest, there should be an enforced "dangerous conditions" speed (7% of crashes). Clearly driving when the weather is good is simply not a problem for Ontarians.

Also helpful would be proper patrolling of yeild signs (10% of crashes), and making it easier to arrest people for following too close (7% of crashes). I'd suggest a law about losing control of a vehicle (8% of crashes), but I think it's usually too late when that happens, anyways.

Technically, it should be illegal to drive properly (45% of crashes), but that's just plain silly.

I also think that speeds should be increased (the amount of people's lives that could be saved by ambulances being able to get to their destinations faster [from less traffic being on the roads] likely outstrips the "risks", which are so small they likely fall within the possible mistake zone of the statistics).

>Similarly, make piracy a huge penalty [e.g. compute ceased, fined 1000$ or etc] and blitz every so often.

Great. So you want to deny access to computers for piracy? Are you sure you've never taped a Hockey game? Do you realize this means offenders would have to be denied their right to use a phone? Do you realize that would mean the government would have to continue to support an extremely expensive and outmoded paper-based infrastructure?

Basically, you'll end up paying for their crimes.

Which reminds me, $1,000 would be a bargain if that's what it really was. In fact, it's usually more around the $100 - $200,000 range. A lot of pirate BBS sysops lost their homes, despite having, at best, maybe $20,000 of pirated software on their machines.

>If you report a pirate [who is convicted] you get x % of the fines. Get the geeks to hunt the pirates!

Yes, let's move from being a socialist country to being a dictatorship! You do realize that the method of control you suggest was the very most popular form of control used during Hitler's regime, right (it's simply a fact -- I'm not invoking Godwin's law here)? And that it was used as a control measure by the soviet union until the cold war was over?

Since we're making up laws to suit ourselves, though, let's outlaw those separate schools. I'm tired of paying for children to be brain damaged, and taught to violate our laws. And it's time to get rid of the CRTC (who make it illegal to have multicultural TV -- only Canadian monoculture is easily available) -- AND I'm tired of having these signals beamed at my house from space and not being able to manipulate them at will. It should be my right to do with any signals being sent to me, against my will, as I wish.

Or should we make the punishments more severe? Personally I think people rolling through stop lines should be fined 500$. I think speeders should have their license revoked. If the cops spent a day doing a traffic blitz they could probably catch a few hundred people [town of 50K here...] easy.

as another poster pointed out. speeding accounts for the cause of a whopping 1% of accidents. However, I'm willing to bet that "fear of getting a speeding ticket" accounts for a good 10% of accidents. Where I live, in upstate New York, people are generally afraid of the police. Driving around during rush hour I usually see about 2 or 3 accidents a day, and invariably there is a speed trap 200 to 300 feet before the accident. People see the speed trap, slam on the breaks (even if they weren't speeding), and get rear-ended.

The police need to stop screwing around with speed traps, where they succeed in doing nothing but scaring the populous and causing accidents, and start enforcing the laws that would actually prevent accidents. Reckless driving, changing lanes without signaling, speeding under unsafe weather conditions, following too close, etc.

I would not report him. Friends and family are the two things that are supposed to be more important to individuals than the law of the land.

If you go turning in all of your friends for anything illegal that you happen to witness, it's likely you won't have friends anymore.. because, well, you'd be a bad friend to have. Plus, it's impossible never do anything that infracts on the law. Especially here in the US where mere words are considered crimes.

I'm not saying if a friend goes out and commits homocide that you should protect them, just to rationalize a situation before blowing a whistle on someone.

Personally, I wouldn't turn anyone in on anything to do with theft from a corporation. This is a capitalist society. Anyone on the top has gotten there by breaking a few rules, so why should the rest of us (the poor people that funded and helped monopolies be what they are today) be the ones who always must play by the rules? It's a double standard in my eyes.

Btw, police officers are some of the biggest criminals we have. I recall in highschool, the kids that turned out to be cops were some of the worst people to associate with. Considering being a police officer requires little more than no felonies on your record and an 8th grade reading level. My assesment is that most officers would rather get paid $24k a year to be in control of other's fates than to make $45k a year in an office somewhere.

Pardon my disrespect for the legal system. It's a mess. How do I go about becoming a Canadian citizen again?

But see, this is Slashdot, and in the Slashdot world you're not allowed to blame anything and copyright does not exist. And no, this comment is not a troll, and those who mod it as such only prove my point further.

Here is what I base this comment on.

The RIAA started out by going after the makers of P2P software. Everyone here yelled "Its not the technology, stupid, is the file traders, go after them instead!" Then recently when the RIAA announced they were going to do precisely that, the same group that was yelling "go after the traders" all of a sudden got their panties in a twist and started crying about how the RIAA shouldn't do that.

Bittorrent isn't going anywhere, and it's a great way to download legitimate works.

For example, the Animatrix shorts (the 4 free ones) or the Red vs Blue movies were valid uses that would have recently been crushed by slashdotting.

Bittorrent is the kind of enabling technology that can keep artists like the guys behind RvB from going under when they get popular... to suggest that nailing pirate sites is going to kill this great technology is just dumb.

While the majority of traffic may be copyright violations, the point is the technology is not meant solely for that purpose. In this case, the technology clearly has uses that do not involve copyright violations. That clear distinction makes a big difference than what Napster was. If Napster had taken more steps to push the P2P concept for much more than just music MP3s (kind of like Kazaa and other P2P) things might have turned out differently, but Napster was meant to trade MP3s (music). Bittorrent is meant to provide a technical solution to file distribution, and several projects and a few companies use that to distribute their work. A cassette deck with the ability to record can be used to violate a copyright. But it can also be used for much more than that. Same with Bittorrent. That little detail makes all the difference in the world.

If pr0n is copyrighted, how come they don't put copy protection on the tapes/DVDs?:P

While I'm at it, given the distribution systems and marketing that exsit for porn in the USA (i.e. largely aimed at video stores or serious junkies), do you think they care if someone steals some rather than buying a tape for $5 at the local video store?

OK, that aside, bittorrent seems to work great for high-demand files. I've followed torrent links of/. for things like the halflife 2 trailer and been amazed at the speed and ease of transfer. Bittorrent, like everything else, is what you make of it. I wasn't particularly aware of torrent sites that offered porn or warez (too bad for me) and in fact, had someone asked me a week ago, I would've said that bittorrent was a P2P system specifically designed to scale to "slashdot-effect" type traffic, not a system for grabbing porn.

Try http://autopr0n.com/torrents/ [autopr0n.com]. I doubt this experiment will work well (I haven't personally tested the link quality) and I don't know about legality, but there's a definite stab at appling BT for this purpose.

Just the same, porn is consistently mistreated in the marketplace. I'll give you that. This is in part the fault of the industry, just as is the case with RIAA. Typical "feature" porn titles (e.g. "Brianna Loves Jenna", "Carribean Undercover") are priced for purchase by video stores. These titles, when new, list for in excess of $30. Prices may fall, slowly (e.g. five to seven year old Vivid/Wave titles are pretty much all under $10 now, in places where new movies

I don't think the original intent of BT was warez. And unlike Napster or Kazza each file forms it's own network, so infringing traffic is totally separate from legitimate traffic.

Honestly, hosting a Bit Torrent seed for a copyrighted file is no different then hosting the file itself, other then the lowered bandwidth bill.

Shutting down BT wouldn't make any more sense then banning HTTP or SMTP, both of which can be used to infringe copyright. BitTorrent is hugely helpful for small content developers who want to distribute their work, especially if they become popular.

A friend of mine recently downloaded the movie "Bruce Almighty" from some apparent RIAA/MPAA honeypot through a BitTorrent client. The university sysadmin got a legal notice from them the very next day, and told me friend that, the next time it happens, she will be fined $200 for her effort. I don't know about you guys out there, but the scene out here is pretty shaken up by this.

The content was provided by MPAA. If they have a right to distrubute copyright holder's work, the download is legal. I don't see how they can display a copyright/legal use notice BEFORE someone downloads the.AVI, in all the language of the world including Navajo, with existing P2P software that doesn't display any notice before downloading a file. If not, the author can only sue MPAA because they misled private users.

You will think I put copyright authors in an impossible situation. But in fact, they just have to switch stategy by focusing on people who distibute their work without permission.

So the men turned from there, and went toward Sodom; but Abraham still stood before the Lord. Then Abraham drew near, and said, "Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" And the Lord said, "if I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake".

[ At this point, the mortal Abraham, ignoring some thorny philosophy issues, dickers with the omnipotent creator of the universe and gradually sweetens the deal until the Lord concedes... ]

"For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it"

So the standard appears to be 10. If even 10 RedHat ISOs have been transferred, then BitTorrent must be spared.

Actually, God was being somewhat condescending.
Further on in this particular story, God ended up destroying the city anyways, the point being that there weren't even ten people within it to have made the city worth sparing. The actual number was fewer than 5 in the whole city, and according to the story, they were given the opportunity to flee the city before it was destroyed (and they did).

One of the interesting things about BitTorrent is that there is no single heirarchy of nodes. All the trackers are run independently, so if one gets shut down, DoSsed, etc.. the others aren't affected.

Point being that if the warez trackers are having trouble, the ones using it for legitimate purposes (downloading open source ISOs, etc..) are unaffected.

Makes it that much harder to claim that the protocol/code has no legitimate uses. If the RIAA/MPAA has a problem with some content, then go after that si

Then we just need to setup more legit torrents. Why not prod the people at sourceforge to setup a bittorrent system?

If technologies begin to be judged "good" or "evil" based on the majority of its usage rather than its intent or capability, then all it takes is to spawn as many instances... no matter how trivial... that aren't "evil" as are necessary to win. If bittorrent's life is in the balance, a few bittorrent mirrors of sunsite, debian, and rpmfind should do the trick.

Yeah, they're doing a damn good job of shutting them down. Just now I test-downloaded Eminem's Lose Yourself, and it only reached a top speed of 110 KB/s. Additionally, there was only 5,753,344 GB of data being shared by 3.6 million users at the time I was logged on, according to the status bar.

I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously. Then, you would just have to get a link to any one of the trackers and when you connect to that tracker it would forward you to a random tracker, or something like that.
There's another advantage to this too: You can no longer "shut down" sites like the *AA's doing, if you make every bit torrent node a tracker!. I don't see any theoretical obstacle to implementing this: all you need to do is to send the info about who has which pieces of a file to all the nodes, apart from sending the pieces of the file itself. Any thoughts on this?

I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously.

If you made this change bittorrent would be just another p2p app. It's main selling point right now is that you can offer up content and still track who's downloading and provide assurance that they are getting a _valid_ file. So RedHat could set up a bittorrent site for their files and still get

for one of the aggrieved parties, let me just say that BitTorrent is nothing short of the Denial of Service attack. I hope they are taken down. When is/. going to learn that you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion?

BitTorrent is nothing like a Denial Of Service attack, infact, it's the exact opposite.

If 99% of the population wants to copy music, and we live in a free world where Democracy wins against tyranny, why is it that 99% of the population are being oppressed by draconian ideals that are out of date in the modern world we live in? Why are they wrong in this democracy? Society should serve the many, not the few, and certanly not the dollar.

Maybe if the aggrieved parties are so concerned about money, they should just get a different job? Like everyone else who doesn't have enough money? Just like coal miners and town cryers have been superseded, so now have shit artists!

Isn't a freenet key not much bigger than the size of a link ? Wouldn't that just shift the problem into Freenet, so that we would just slashdot Freenet when there was a suddenly popular file, and there would be this painful lag until Freenet cached stuff at enough nodes ?

DoS attacks are so simple that a thirteen year old child with a decent program and set of instructions passed down to him from an older, better hacker can easily create an effective one. That means that for any given site, especially a high bandwidth one, to be shut down, all they need is for there to be one jackass on the entire internet. Unfortunately for the BT sites, the internet is the natural habitat of the Bipedal Jackass. The internet, filled with lush gardens of Morons, Suckers, and Pseudo-Intellectuals amidst a backdrop of easy hacking targets and Asian girls doing things that could make you go blind, is positively irresistable to them. In fact, you could even say that, fundamentally, Jackasses are the internet. So the BT sites are pretty much screwed.

On a slightly more serious note, though, it doesn't help that all of these BT sites are lawbreakers. Sure, they're breaking petty little copyright laws that, in the grand scheme of things, rank somewhere five spots below shoplifting and not saying "God bless you" when someone sneezes, but they're still breaking the law, and lawbreakers can't exactly stroll up to Johnny Law and ask him for help. If you break the law, then you forfeit the basic protections of the law (the ones ranking below having your murderer, rapist, or car thief found and prosecuted), because the cops have no interest in helping you get your illegal copyright infringement site back on its feet. This sort of Wild West system, where the victims can't run to the police for fear of incriminating themselves, makes the BT sites free target practice for hackers. Microsoft and Amazon, on the other hand, have no such legal restraints and can easily prosecute their attackers.

Will corporate pressure kill the BitTorrent movement, or will it keep flying from site to site before it settles somewhere 'safe' like Sealand's HavenCo?
hmm... This doesn't sound too much like an advertisement, does it?
Funny how so many slashdot articles are commercials in disguise...

You were moderated off-topic, very fairly I might add. Maybe "off-topic" is not the most appropriate, but its a down-mod, and its the most fair moderation for you, jpmahala, since Slashdot currently lacks a Stupid, False-Humor, False-Question moderation. Anyways, I myself am straying off topic, so I had better cut to the chase shall I become a victim of my own hypocracy.

As you will notice (either immediately or after several seconds of high-throughput processing, depending on your current state of drug consumption), the question posed by the submitter is mere speculation. Not only speculation, but very cogent and reasonable speculation. You see, HavenCo is the ONLY place of its kind.

Not only is HavenCo one of a kind, but its hosted on an artificial island in the sea, christened Sealand. Navy sailors originally dubbed the island [expletive deleted], but it renamed after a feud with the local greenpeac..

In any case, no other city is like HavenCo. Except maybe LA. The writer said "like Sealand's HavenCo", emphasis on like. This suggests there may be, in the future hopefully, other service offerings similar to HavenCo's. At the moment, this is not the case. HavenCo has been a subject of several Slashdot postings and Wired articles; it surely piqued my interest.

If I was a major warez dealer, you bet hell I would buy a HavenCo account and setup a public FTP server. I'd have completely Sealand-legal new musical releases, movies (appropriate for children of course), as well as a myriad of software available for selection. My WaReZ site would be public, and I would have no user limits. I would rake in the dough through advertisements appropriate for all audiences. All within the jaundiced eye of the RIAA/MPAA.

They couldn't do a damned well thing.

And that's the point of this point. Its not a plug, its not an advertisement, its not a commercial. Its a way of life.